About Barack Obama About Barack Obama Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. —President Obama President Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. He was born on August 4th, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a mother from Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham, and a father from Kenya, Barack Obama Sr. He was also raised by his grandfather, who served in Patton’s army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to become vice president at a local bank. He worked his way through school—Occidental College in Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York, and later, Harvard Law School—with the help of scholarship money and student loans. In 1985, Barack Obama moved to Chicago, where he got his start in community organizing on the city’s South Side, working to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

The President called that time in his life " the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School ." He has credited that experience as crucial to finding his identity—something that shaped his path to the White House. Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. During his time in Springfield, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, he reached across the aisle to pass the farthest-reaching lobbying reform in a generation, lock up the world’s most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by tracking federal spending online. Barack Obama was sworn in as president on January 20th, 2009, in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, at a time when our economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month . He acted immediately to get our economy back on track. Since then, the private sector has added back more than 10 million jobs during the longest, uninterrupted period of job growth in our nation’s history.

In his first term, the President cut taxes for every American worker—putting $3,600 back in the pockets of the typical family. He passed historic Wall Street reform to make sure taxpayers never again have to bail out big banks. He passed the landmark Affordable Care Act, helping to put quality and affordable health care within reach for millions of Americans. He ended the war in Iraq and is working to responsibly end the war in Afghanistan. He’s the first sitting president to stand up for marriage equality , and is fighting for equal pay and a woman’s right to make her own health decisions . He’s made a college education more affordable for millions of students and their families. And he believes it’s time for a comprehensive solution to fix our broken immigration system. The President believes an economy that's built to last starts by growing and strengthening the middle class—that’s why he has a plan to create jobs and restore economic security to working families. He’s been driven by the basic values that make our country great: America prospers when we’re all in it together, when hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded, and when everyone—from Main Street to Wall Street—does their fair share and plays by the same rules.

INSPIRING A GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT The President's legacy as a grassroots organizer inspired millions. Organizing for Action is proud to be built from the ground up by people who believe that real, lasting change only happens when you organize. Is Barack Obama a natural-born citizen of the U.S.? : snopes.com Is Barack Obama a natural-born citizen of the U.S.? - - Claim: Barack Obama does not qualify as a natural-born citizen of the U.S. because his mother was too young. Status: False. Example: [Collected via e-mail, June 2008] CAN OBAMA BE PRESIDENT? It seems that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president after all for the following reason: Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between "December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986." Presidential office requires a natural-born citizen if the child was not born to two U.S. citizen parents, which of course is what exempts John McCain though he was born in the Panama Canal.

US Law very clearly stipulates: "If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16." Barack Obama's father was not a U.S. citizen and Obama's mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama's birth, but *after* age 16. It doesn't matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama's birth when she was 18 in Hawaii. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama's birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen.

As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time and was not. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office. *** Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President. *** Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. citizen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia. Now you can see why Obama's aides stopped his speech about how we technically have more than 50 states, because it would have led to this discovery. This is very clear cut and a blaring violation of U.S. election law. I think the Gov.

of California would be very interested in knowing this if Obama were elected President without being a natural-born U.S. citizen, and it would set precedence. Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days. Origins: The minimum qualifications for the presidency of the United States specified in Article II of the Constitution are few and seemingly straightforward: In order to be President, a person must be a natural-born citizen of the United States, must be at least thirty-five years old, and must have been a resident of the United States for fourteen years. These qualifications aren't quite so straightforward as they might seem, however. For example, what does the phrase "fourteen years a resident within the United States" mean? Can those fourteen years be cumulative, or do they have to be consecutive? Do the fourteen years of U.S. residency have to immediately precede the presidential election, or can they have occurred at any period in a candidate's life? These were issues that confronted Herbert Hoover, who, because of his work (first for a British mining firm, and later for the U.S. government during World War I), had spent a good deal of time abroad and returned to the U.S.

less than fourteen years prior to his election to the presidency in 1928. Likewise, the "natural-born citizen" requirement is not so straightforward either, because the Constitution didn't define what a natural-born citizen was. (The definition of "natural-born citizen" was left up to individual states to decide until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, but even that amendment has been subject to further interpretation.) What qualifies a person for natural-born citizenship status under U.S. law can be quite complicated, depending on factors such as where the person was born, when he was born, where he and his parents lived, and the nationalities of his parents. Some of these factors might seemingly come into play in the case of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Although his mother was herself a natural-born U.S. citizen, his father was a Kenyan national, and his parents may or may not have been legally married in the eyes of U.S. law. Moreover, his parents split up when he was but a toddler, and his mother soon afterwards married another foreign national and moved with Barack to Indonesia. The item quoted above posits that Barack Obama does not qualify as a natural-born citizen of the U.S.

because the law in effect at the time he was born specified that "If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16." Since Barack Obama only had one U.S. citizen parent (his mother), and his mother had not been residing in the U.S. for at least five years after the age of 16 when Barack was born (because she herself was only 18 at the time), then he's not a natural-born citizen. A few facets of this claim immediately jump out as being far-fetched: first, that a sitting U.S. Senator who has already spent a good deal of time and money securing his party's nomination for the presidency would suddenly be discovered as ineligible due to an obscure provision of U.S. law; and second, that U.S. law would essentially penalize someone who would otherwise qualify for natural-born citizenship status simply because his mother was too young. The fact is, the qualifications listed in the example quoted above are moot because they refer to someone who was born outside the United States.

Since Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, they do not apply to him. The Fourteenth Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." Since Hawaii is part of the United States, even if Barack Obama's parents were both non-U.S. citizens who hadn't even set foot in the country until just before he was born, he'd still qualify as a natural-born citizen. Some have claimed that Barack Obama's Hawaiian birthplace doesn't qualify him as a natural-born citizen because Hawaii was not yet a state when he was born. This claim is wrong: Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state almost two years before Barack Obama's birth there ( 21 August Barack Obama - U.S. Presidents - HISTORY.com Google Early life Obama’s father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, grew up in a small village in Nyanza Province, Kenya, as a member of the Luo ethnicity. He won a scholarship to study economics at the University of Hawaii , where he met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from Wichita, Kansas , whose father had worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression and fought with the U.S.

Army in World War II before moving his family to Hawaii in 1959. Barack and Ann’s son, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961. Did You Know? Not only was Obama the first African-American president, he was also the first to be born outside the continental United States. Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. Obama’s parents later separated, and Barack Sr. went back to Kenya; he would see his son only once more before dying in a car accident in 1982. After remarrying an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, Ann moved with her young son to Jakarta in the late 1960s, where she worked at the U.S. embassy. In 1970, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. He attended the Punahou School, an elite private school where, as he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, he first began to understand the tensions inherent in his mixed racial background.

After two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, from which he graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science. Pre-Election Career After a two-year stint working in corporate research and at the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago , where he took a job as a community organizer with a church-based group, the Developing Communities Project. For the next several years, he worked with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the city’s largely black South Side. Obama would later call the experience “the best education I ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” the prestigious institution he entered in 1988. In 1996, Obama officially launched his own political career, winning election to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat from the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park. Despite tight Republican control during his years in the state senate, Obama was able to build support among both Democrats and Republicans in drafting legislation on ethics and health care reform.

He helped create a state earned-income tax credit that benefited the working poor, promoted subsidies for early childhood education programs and worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases. Re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Democratic primary for the U. S. House of Representatives seat held by the popular four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. As a state senator, Obama notably went on record as an early opponent of President George W. Bush’s push to war with Iraq. During a rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza in October 2002, he spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars…I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U. S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” When Republican Peter Fitzgerald announced that he would vacate his U.S. Senate seat in 2004 after only one term, Obama decided to run.

He won 52 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. After his original Republican opponent in the general election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race, the former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in. That July, Obama gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, shooting to national prominence with his eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. In November 2004, Illinois delivered 70 percent of its votes to Obama (versus Keyes’ 27 percent), sending him to Washington as only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction . During his tenure, Obama notably focused on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and the health threat posed by avian flu. With Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma , he created a Web site that tracks all federal spending, aimed at rebuilding citizens’ trust in government. He partnered with another Republican, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana , on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia.

In August 2006, Obama traveled to Kenya, where thousands of people lined the streets to welcome him. He published his second book, The Audacity of Hope, in October 2006. 2008 Presidential Campaign On February 10, 2007, Obama formally announced his candidacy for president of the United States. A victory in the Iowa primary made him a viable challenger to the early frontrunner, the former first lady and current New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he outlasted in a grueling primary campaign to claim the Democratic nomination in early June 2008. Obama chose as his running mate Joseph R. Biden Jr. Biden had been a U.S. senator from Delaware since 1972, was a one-time Democratic candidate for president and served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s opponent was long-time Arizona Senator John S. McCain, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner-of-war, who chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. If elected, Palin would have been the nation’s first-ever female vice-president.

As in the primaries, Obama’s campaign worked to build support at the grassroots level and used what supporters saw as the candidate’s natural charisma, unusual life story and inspiring message of hope and change to draw impressive crowds to Obama’s public appearances, both in the U.S. and on a campaign trip abroad. They worked to bring new voters–many of them young or black, both demographics they believed favored Obama–to become involved in the election. A crushing financial crisis in the months leading up to the election shifted the nation’s focus to economic issues, and both Obama and McCain worked to show they had the best plan for economic improvement. With several weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Sadly, Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died after a battle with cancer on November 3, the day before voters went to the polls. She had been a tremendously influential force in her grandson’s life and had diligently followed his historic run for office from her home in Honolulu. On November 4, lines at polling stations around the nation heralded a historic turnout and resulted in a Democratic victory, with Obama capturing some Republican strongholds ( Virginia , Indiana) and key battleground states ( Florida , Ohio ) that had been won by Republicans in recent elections.

Taking the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park with Michelle and their two young daughters, Malia and Sasha, Obama acknowledged the historic nature of his win while reflecting on the serious challenges that lay ahead. “The road ahead will be long, our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.” The president and 24 other members of his administration weigh in on their proudest moments, their regrets and the belief that they left it all on the field. Tags President Barack Obama | whitehouse.gov President Barack Obama Other Advisory Boards President Barack Obama Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story -- values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. Download Hi-res (1256 KB) Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank. After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants. He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community. President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose.

In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online. He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. After being re-elected in 2012, President Obama is currently serving his second and final term, which will end in January 2017. See photos from the President's second inauguration here. President Obama and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia and Sasha. Learn more about President Obama's spouse, First Lady Michelle Obama . Follow President Obama on Twitter at @POTUS . Send questions, comments, concerns, or well-wishes to the President or his staff online using this form . If you want to send a written letter, find out how to do that here .

Barack Obama Birth Certificate : snopes.com Claim: Barack Obama's birth certificate is a forgery. FALSE Example: [Collected via e-mail, June 2008] I read that Obama will not release his birth certificate. Have heard rumors it's because he is listed as white. Or that because he isn't a U.S. born citizen. Origins: In April 2011, President Barack Obama sought to put end to rumors claiming that he was not a natural-born citizen of the United States by obtaining and releasing a copy of his long form birth certificate issued by the state of Hawaii. Officials from that state certified that the copy of the certificate they provided to President Obama was authentic: The Hawaii State Health Department recently complied with a request by President Barack Obama for certified copies of his original Certificate of Live Birth, which is sometimes referred to in the media as a "long form" birth certificate. "We hope that issuing certified copies of the original Certificate of Live Birth to President Obama will end the numerous inquiries related to his birth in Hawaii," Hawaii Health Director Loretta Fuddy said.

"I have seen the original records filed at the Department of Health and attest to the authenticity of the certified copies the department provided to the President that further prove the fact that he was born in Hawaii." On April 25, 2011, pursuant to President Obama's request, Director Fuddy personally witnessed the copying of the original Certificate of Live Birth and attested to the authenticity of the two copies. Dr. Alvin Onaka, the State Registrar, certified the copies. As they had with the Certification of Live Birth made public by the Obama campaign in June 2008, birthers immediately claimed that the long form birth certificate was also a forgery. The primary arguments advanced to demonstrate that the certificate was forged were claims that some textual elements of the certificate were anachronistic, and that the existence of layers found when the PDF file was opened with Adobe Illustrator proved that it had been altered. All of these arguments are erroneous. The claims of anachronism stemmed from three elements in the certificate: 1. Back in 1961 people of color were called 'Negroes.' So how can the Obama 'birth certificate' state he is 'African-American' when the term wasn't even used at that time?

2. The birth certificate that the White House released lists Obama's birth as August 4, 1961. It also lists Barack Hussein Obama as his father. No big deal, right? At the time of Obama's birth, it also shows that his father is aged 25 years old, and that Obama's father was born in "Kenya, East Africa". This wouldn't seem like anything of concern, except the fact that Kenya did not even exist until 1963, two whole years after Obama's birth, and 27 years after his father's birth. How could Obama's father have been born in a country that did not yet exist? Up and until Kenya was formed in 1963, it was known as the "British East Africa Protectorate". 3. On the birth certificate released by the White House, the listed place of birth is "Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital". This cannot be, because the hospital(s) in question in 1961 were called "Kaui Keolani Children's Hospital" and "Kapi'olani Maternity Home", respectively.

The name did not change to Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital until 1978, when these two hospitals merged. How can this particular name of the hospital be on a birth certificate dated 1961 if this name had not yet been applied to it until 1978? Claims that these elements are anachronistic to 1961 (the year of Barack Obama's birth) are incorrect: Nowhere on Barack Obama's birth certificate does the term "African-American" appear. The space for "Race of Father" is filled in with the word "African," which at the time was a descriptor that blacks who were actually native-born Africans (like Barack Obama's father was) were more likely to use for themselves than "negro" (the latter being synonymous with " slave " in Euro-colonial countries such as Kenya). In 1895 the British Empire established the East Africa Protectorate, the forerunner of the country now known as the republic of Kenya.

Although Kenya did not achieve complete independence from the United Kingdom until 1963, it was known as the Kenya Colony from 1920 onwards and was typically referred to as Kenya long before 1963. A search of news reports from 1961 (the year of Barack Obama's birth) turns up hundreds and hundreds of news articles referencing that entity simply as "Kenya." The former Kapi'olani Maternity Home became the Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (where Barack Obama was born) in 1931, and it retained that appellation until 1971, when its name was shortened to Kapi'olani Hospital. The Kauikeolani Children's Hospital (where Barack Obama was not born) was a separate entity which merged with the Kapi'olani Hospital in 1978 to become the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children.

A listing of social services available in the Hawaiian islands documents that the facility bore that name prior to 1961: Moreover, a copy of a birth certificate issued to a child born in Honolulu one day after Barack Obama also shows "Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital" listed in the "Name of Hospital" field. As for the argument that opening the birth certificate's PDF file in Adobe Illustrator reveals the presence of multiple layers, which proves that the image was altered, that claim was debunked by an Adobe-certified expert : It didn't take long for some of President Obama’s doubters to claim the long-awaited birth certificate posted online by the White House had been altered or might be a fake. The doubters have latched onto the idea that Adobe Illustrator — the premier program for computer graphic artists — "reveals" evidence of document manipulation in the Obama birth certificate. They note Illustrator reveals nine separate layers of the document, and claim it's "proof" the file has been altered. But that's not so, says Jean-Claude Tremblay, a leading software trainer and Adobe-certified expert, who has years of experience working with and teaching Adobe Illustrator.

He said the layers cited by doubters are evidence of the use of common, off-the-shelf scanning software — not evidence of a forgery. "I have seen a lot of illustrator documents that come from photos and contain those kind of clippings — and it looks exactly like this," he said. Tremblay explained that the scanner optical character recognition (OCR) software attempts to translate characters or words in a photograph into text. He said the layers cited by the doubters shows that software at work — and nothing more. "When you open it in Illustrator it looks like layers, but it doesn't look like someone built it from scratch. If someone made a fake it wouldn't look like this," he said. "Some scanning software is trying to separate the background and the text and splitting element into layers and parts of layers." Tremblay also said that during the scanning process, instances where the software was unable to separate text fully from background led to the creation of a separate layer within the document. This could be places where a signature runs over the line of background, or typed characters touch the internal border of the document.

"I know that you can scan a document from a scanner [and] most of the time it will appear as one piece, but that doesn’t mean that there's no software that's doing this kind of stuff," he said, adding that it's really quite common. John Woodman, author of Is Barack Obama's Birth Certificate a Fraud?: A Computer Guy Examines The Evidence for Forgery, also debunked the "layers" argument in a series of videos: The March "Cold Case Posse" investigation of Barack Obama's birth certificate conducted by Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio produced no new evidence demonstrating that document to be a forgery; that entity's report by Mara Zebest simply recycled old arguments that had long since been thoroughly debunked in detail. Likewise, a July 2012 announcement from Sheriff Arpaio repeated more rumors that had already been debunked. Last updated: 22 July 2012 Sources: Born in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A.

Posted on August 21, 2008 | Updated on November 1, 2008; April 27, 2011 Summary In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document’s authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is “fake.” We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as “supporting documents” to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said. Update, Nov. 1: The director of Hawaii’s Department of Health confirmed Oct. 31 that Obama was born in Honolulu. Analysis Update Nov.

1: The Associated Press quoted Chiyome Fukino as saying that both she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama’s original birth certificate. Fukino also was quoted by several other news organizations. The Honolulu Advertiser quoted Fukino as saying the agency had been bombarded by requests, and that the registrar of statistics had even been called in at home in the middle of the night. Honolulu Advertiser, Nov. 1 2008: “This has gotten ridiculous,” state health director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said yesterday. “There are plenty of other, important things to focus on, like the economy, taxes, energy.” . . . Will this be enough to quiet the doubters? “I hope so,” Fukino said. “We need to get some work done.” Fukino said she has “personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.” Update, April 27, 2011: The White House released the long-form version of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, confirming (yet again) that he was born in the United States.

The Hawaii Department of Health made an exception in Obama’s case and issued copies of the “Certificate of Live Birth.” Since we first wrote about Obama’s birth certificate on June 16, speculation on his citizenship has continued apace. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page . That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News. Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life? Doocy: What do you mean they have a “false birth certificate” on their Web site? Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it. Doocy: Well, couldn’t it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate? Corsi: No, it’s a — there’s been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop.

It’s a fake document that’s on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce. Corsi isn’t the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are: The birth certificate doesn’t have a raised seal. It isn’t signed. No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version. In the zoomed-in view, there’s a strange halo around the letters. The certificate number is blacked out. The date bleeding through from the back seems to say “2007,” but the document wasn’t released until 2008. The document is a “certification of birth,” not a “certificate of birth.” Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.

The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller Alvin T. Onaka’s signature stamp The raised seal Blowup of text You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven’t been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes. The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.” The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above. The document is a “certification of birth,” also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents’ hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department.

We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response. The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process. We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that’s when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and “all the records we could get our hands on” according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn’t release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama’s citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number.

Says Shauna: “[We] couldn’t get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we’ve found out it’s pretty irrelevant for the outside world.” The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 – 010641. Blowup of certificate number Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama’s information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn’t have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible “scenario” without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible. We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect.

Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn’t meet the Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen.” We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well : “It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over.” In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961: The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama “likely” was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu. Of course, it’s distantly possible that Obama’s grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday.

We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A. Update, August 26: We received responses to some of our questions from the Hawaii Department of Health. They couldn’t tell us anything about their security paper, but they did answer another frequently-raised question: why is Obama’s father’s race listed as “African”? Kurt Tsue at the DOH told us that father’s race and mother’s race are supplied by the parents, and that “we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be.” We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama, Sr., would have thought of and reported himself as “African.” It’s certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be. When we asked about the security borders, which look different from some other examples of Hawaii certifications of live birth, Kurt said “The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed.

A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised.” He also confirmed that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for “all reasonable purposes.” — by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller Sources Q: Did the crew of Air Force One refuse to fly President Obama to play golf? A: No. It’s a fake news story specifically targeting “conservative readers.” Hawaii Was Not a State When Obama was Born There and his Mother Was Not Eligible to Give Birth to a U.S. Citizen-Fiction! A real example of the eRumor as it has appeared on the Internet: Version #1 Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. Natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between “December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986? . Presidential office requires a natural-born citizen if the child was not born to two U.S. Citizen parents, which of course is what exempts John McCain though he was born in the Panama Canal. US Law very clearly stipulates: “…If only one parent was a U.S.

Citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.” Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. Citizen and Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. Citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawai’i being a territory) the mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama’s birth, but *after* age 16. It doesn’t matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. Citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth when she was 18 in Hawai’i. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen. As aformentioned, she was a young college student at the time and was not.

Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Cizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office. *** Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President. *** Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. Citzen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia. Now you can see why Obama’s aides stopped his speech about how we technically have more than 50 states, because it would have led to this discovery. This is very clear cut and a blaring violation of U.S. Election law. I think the Gov. Of California would be very insterested in knowing this if Obama were elected President without being a natural-born U.S.

Citizen, and it would set precedence. Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days… Version #2 Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986. Presidential office requires a natural-born citizen if the child was not born to two U.S. citizen parents, which of course is what exempts John McCain though he was born in the Panama Canal US Law very clearly stipulates: ‘If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.’ Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. citizen and Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S.

citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama’s birth, but after age 16. It doesn’t matter after. In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth when she was 18 in Hawaii. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen. As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time and was not. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office. Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President.

Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. citizen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16.. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have e had, rather than living in Indonesia . Now you can see why Obama’s aides stopped his speech about how we technically have more than 50 states, because it would have led to this discovery. This is very clear cut and a blaring violation of U.S. election law. I think the Gov. of California would be very interested in knowing this if Obama were elected President without being a natural-born U.S. citizen, and it would set precedence. Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days. Thomas Sowell Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow The Hoover Institution

Question: In what year was Barack Obama born?
Answer: 1961